leave something behind when you go

Thursday

One of the first exercises that we did today was to walk through our path in the garden in our heads. After doing this we wrote down the sorts of things that we experienced and what we noticed.

After this we split up into our pairs and created a short response to yesterdays research task. Henrik and I created a piece exploring the movement of water through the gardens. Other members of the group explored things such as letters from the archives and the history of trees in the gardens.

Next we were split up into groups of 3/4 and given the task of making a piece of work using the ‘system’ task, our research material and our three named places. The group that I was in started working by showing each other our systems. This progressed into a dialogue about old to new and the way in which things on the estate seem to always refresh and renew themselves such as the way that the great hall went from a grand building to a ruin and then back to a grand building again. We also spent some time arguing over which Chekov came to Dartington! We then used this dialogue to feed our performance and began creating.

After we had worked for an hour we spent some time individually working on our performances of our farewell songs, then we went to lunch.

After lunch we performed our farewell songs around the old school building and experimented with the spaces in which the songs were placed and what happens when the songs are sung over each other.

Next we viewed the work that we had created earlier. One group showed a piece where cups of water were fenced off from a person who kept stealing them and pouring them over another person who was walking around the site. Another piece was a sort of sensory soundscape where the audience experienced different sounds and sensations created by the performers. Our piece explored ideas of renewal and finished with us creating a metaphorical link between Dartington and Falmouth, and the final group used mud to create traces of people and then images on the wall within a studio space.
Matthew